I remember Nelly well; she was a kind, homely, down-to-earth and practical woman, devoted to her family, and served wonderful cakes. She possessed great strength of character, no doubt forged in her challenging childhood and toughened by the subsequent tragedies which continued to punctuate her life.
In 1933, when the Nazi party came to power, there were more than three thousand Jewish lawyers in Prussia, over a quarter of the total number of practitioners in the region. This ‘over-representation’ was resented; on 31 March the Prussian Minister of Justice, Hanns Kerrl, announced measures dismissing most Jews working in the civil service and the law, ordering that ‘only certain Jewish attorneys shall practise, generally corresponding to the proportion of Jews in the rest of the population.’ This figure would have stood at less than one per cent. It seems that Kerrl took these steps on his own initiative, prior even to the promulgation one week later by the Nazi government of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service that mandated the dismissal of all non-Aryans. The latter category was defined as excluding ‘anyone descended from non-Aryan, particularly Jewish, parents or grandparents’. To lose one’s job, just one ‘wrong’ grandparent sufficed.
Alfred had been practising his profession for scarcely three years when he was removed from his post. A subsequent letter from the Prussian Ministry of Justice, dated 3 July 1933, by which time he was already in Berlin, informed him of the supposedly ‘initial’ duration of his ‘retirement’:
By means of this letter, you are discharged from your duties as of 7 April 1933 until 1 November 1933, on the basis of section 3 of the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service. Your retirement will continue until this date.
Referring to a series of bye-laws, the letter made it clear that ‘no severance payments are due’. The signature was illegible. The envelope was marked persönlich, followed by an exclamation mark. One might wonder why; Alfred’s colleagues would surely have known exactly what the receipt of such a missive meant. Perhaps the sender didn’t want other eyes to see the cold details of how the ministry dismissed its faithful servants. It would be hard to imagine a letter which showed less personal concern.
Letter to Alfred Freimann discharging him from his post in the Prussian judiciary.
The act in question, the Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service, was to affect many thousands of people, often costing them the positions to which they had given decades of diligent service. In Frankfurt, Alfred’s uncle Aron, a notable scholar who had devoted his life to developing the Judaica collection in the municipal library into one of the finest and most extensive in the world, was summarily ‘retired’ and shortly afterwards required to hand in his keys to the building.
Soon after receiving notification of his dismissal, Alfred was tipped off by a non-Jewish colleague who had seen his name on a Gestapo list. He advised him to leave Königsberg at once. Alfred departed for his parents’ home in Berlin with little more than the coat on his back. Nelly followed two days later with their three-year-old daughter Ruthie. They, too, took no luggage; nobody could be trusted, not even the nanny. Safer in the comparative anonymity of the capital, and close to the offices of the Treuhand-Stelle, they applied, successfully, for certificates for Palestine. Parting from his parents must have been hard; Alfred was perhaps the closest to his father of the six children in temperament and interests and even in 1933 it must have been far from certain that they would ever see one another again.
A year after arriving in Palestine Alfred left the country, albeit temporarily, drawn by the opportunity of teaching at the University of Rome. But it was not to prove an attractive option. ‘We went to Italy,’ Nelly told me. ‘Mussolini was already in power. I said to Alfred: “We’re not staying here. We’ve seen it all before. There’s only one place we’re going to live.”’ They returned to Palestine where, with no opportunities available in the academic sphere, Alfred took a position as legal advisor to an insurance company. At night he followed his passion for scholarship. Paper was in short supply; he used the backs of insurance forms, covering them with notes for the book he was preparing on Jewish marriage law, to this day considered a classic study on the subject. Further jottings showed that he was already at work on the sequel, a history of the Jewish law of divorce. All through his life he had a passion for Jewish books, which he collected avidly despite the limited means at his disposal.
In 1935, Nelly gave birth to their son Dani, the first member of the family to be born outside Europe. Alfred’s parents travelled from Berlin to join them for the celebration of the circumcision. It was a journey Regina would longingly recall:
This week brings Passover … In the year of ’35 we arrived in Palestine during these very days; the joy of our dear departed Papa when he saw the land from the ship was indescribable. What has happened since that time!
Had it not been for his sense of duty towards his beleaguered congregants back in Berlin, Rabbi Freimann would have remained in Palestine, Alfred’s daughter Ruthie told me as we sat in her home in Tel Aviv seventy-five years later. She must have been just five when they came to visit; it was the last time she would ever see either of her grandparents.
By the summer of 1938 Alfred and his family were well settled in Jerusalem. Reports from more recent arrivals from Germany, who included two of his sisters, made the extreme urgency of his mother’s position all too clear. The situation had deteriorated greatly since he himself had fled; there were no ways out of Germany that did not present major difficulties. Restrictive quotas made the waiting period for visas to the United States extremely lengthy. Exactly how long depended on one’s nationality; separate immigration quotas were fixed for each country. Who could foresee what might happen by the date their number came up, maybe sometime as far distant as 1941 or 1942? After Kristallnacht, when it was no longer possible to cling to the illusion that things would get better, it was clear that an indefinite wait might well amount to a delayed death sentence. The British authorities had meanwhile also had placed far tighter restrictions on entry into Palestine. It was sometimes easier to obtain visas for a number of South American countries or for the Far East, but how was one to know what life was really like in those faraway places, or if one could make a living and put food in the mouths of one’s family?
While it grew ever harder to leave, it also became increasingly difficult to remain in Germany. Jews were progressively stripped of their status, their right to access amenities, their opportunities to work and their economic assets. On 15 September 1935 at the party rally in Nuremberg the promulgation of two new laws was announced to the Reichstag. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans. It also forbade Jews to employ German women under the age of forty-five in their households, ‘in case of Rassenschande’ (racial pollution). The second, the Reich Citizenship Law, defined those not of German blood as merely subjects of the state, in contrast to Aryans who were full Reichsbürger (citizens of the Reich). This effectively stripped Jews of all their rights as citizens and placed them outside the protection of the law. It is not surprising that numerous Jews, many of whom had lost their sons, or had themselves fought with honour for their beloved Vaterland in the First World War, found it hard to fathom such a deep and utter betrayal. Henceforth Germany’s Jews, as well as Roma and other non-Aryans, were legally relegated to the rank of a lesser species. Among the few documents I found relating to my father and his parents were those indicating that they had ceased to be citizens of Germany: ‘German citizenship declared void following the announcement of 7 November 1940’, the